I think the concept of offering a reward for someone who can redesign the beige box is a good one, but it seems like Intel is going after the wrong audience. It seems to me that if a company had an idea to make an amazing new design then they would already be doing it. I think a better idea would be to offer up a reward for individuals who have ideas, but not the means to actually start producing these things. Either buy the design and pay a reward, or else give the person seed money to start a business producing the things. I can think of a number of things off the top of my head that would improve the current design of the beige box, but I have no way of building one for the contest, nor do I suspect that what Intel is offering would be sufficient to get started in the business of manufacturing them.
no number of failures proves something is impossible, but it only takes a single success to prove that it is possible.
If the surgery had failed, it wouldn't have proven that it couldn't be done, but since the surgery worked, it proved that in at least some circumstances, it can be done (it can be done because it HAS been done).
In case anyone doesn't catch the reference, it's a mirrored version of a code from metroid on NES
Justin Bailey
------ ------
which allows you to start on Norfair with everything except the ice beam and without samus's power suit.
I'm not sure I agree with this. During my whole time at school, I never turned in any work that I didn't do myself. Pretty much if I didn't do something for whatever reason, I didn't feel that it was right for me to turn in someone elses work. There were times however that I turned in work that I had done previously. For the most part, I considered it not only morally justifiable, but that it would have been stupid and a waste of time to have not done so.
Most of the time these were programming assignments. If I have previously developed a class/method/algorithm to do something, you are going to have a very difficult time convincing me that there is some reason that I shouldn't use it to complete an assignment. There had also been cases where I had an assignment complete or nearly so, rather than simply using a module.
The way I see it is this: it is not academically dishonest for me to turn in some work that I had previously completed. The assumption is that I did the work, and if I did indeed do it, then I should be able to make use of that work however I want. Furthermore, the whole point of an assignment is to help the student learn how to do something, and for the professor to be able to gage how well the student has learned the subject. If I were able to, at some point in the past, complete something meeting the requirements for the assignment, then I have demonstrated my knowledge of the subject and obviously proven to myself that I can already do whatever it is that I am supposed to be learning.
well, there was an article posted on slashdot a couple of years ago about ripping vinyl with a scanner. I'm sure a team of determined hackers could refine the technology so that it would be easily usable.
Of course then they would outlaw cameras and scanners as "circumvention devices".
Agreed. Although I'm working as a developer now, my last position was doing modeling and animation. There is a lot of artistic talent involved, but I would also consider it a technical position. Working on complex scenes in Maya, I know that I spent almost as much time writing MEL as rigging, and even when your not writing code it's still no walk in the park.
You hear a lot about the relationship between music and programming. You don't hear as much about the relationship between visual people and programming, but probably because all of the really talented people in those areas are out writing software. There is an asthetic to code as well, and I think most skilled developers are aware of it, at a conscious or unconcsious level.
You are way off. What net neutrality prevents is a situation like this:
The only ISP I can get in my area is Road Runner. They want me to use AOL Search, so what they do is throttle all of the other search engines, so that I get so disguested I end up just using AOL Search.
Another example would be:
My ISP sees that a lot of traffic is going to MySpace. MySpace is making a lot of money on ads. They approach MySpace and basically say "our customers are going to your website. Pay us $x,000 a month or we will throttle access to your site so that it is unusable."
In those cases, it sucks for people stuck on those ISPs, but it can get even worse. Imagine ISP A is a large ISP in the midwest. Most traffic traveling through the US passes through them at some point. They suddenly say to everyone "we're going to queue traffic so that who ever pays us the most gets through first, and if you don't pay us at all we're going to hold all your packets for 10 minutes.".
Esentially, net neutrality prevents this sort of extortion. It doesn't mean that an ISP has to make sure everything runs at the same speed, but they can't slow things down unless they are payed a "protection fee"
or for some of us...
1. HD games
2. HD Movies
3. Widescreen movies without the letterbox
4. Plain ol' Movies
5. TV
6. Doorstop
7. source of random spare parts
8. Coffee Table ...
100. Sports.
I don't think using a jpeg for a wallpaper as opposed to a bitmap is going to save any ram. a bitmap is uncompressed, a jpeg is compressed. If you set a jpeg as a wallpaper, it still has to uncompress that jpeg to display it. Worst case is you are now using the same amount of ram, but for the jpeg you are also adding the processor cycles to decompress it.
From what I understand, a few weeks ago amazon did go down for a little bit, and apparently it was a big deal to a lot of people (I know it was on fark, and I think some other more 'mainstream' places picked it up too).
That aside, I'm not sure how much I agree with the rest of your point in general. I think a lot of the time people are more apt to trust a black box, because they can't see the possible failure points. This is a problem with a lot of things, especially computers- since if you're not an IT type person (professionally, as a student, or as a hobbyist) it's unlikely that you will be familiar enough with the systems to know their failure points, which is why we run into problems because people often implicitly trust the computer.
I'm not nessessarily talking about paying to license a patent specifically. A lot of times it comes to to a company wanting to create a product, and they end up paying off other companies in case they accidentally violate some vauge clause in some old and unused patent. I don't know about you, but if I come up with an idea out of thin air and try to market it, I don't think it's stealing just because you had the idea first (especially if you've never even made a product based on the idea).
There are two big problems I see with this:
The first is that there are a lot of articles and sections of articles in wikipedia that are heavily edited without the facts changing much. This is mostly a good thing, cleaning up grammar, etc. But the if that is used as a basis for how reliable the information is, it could be misleading because the software won't know if the facts have changed, or just their wording
The other problem that I see with this is that it makes it easy for people who "disagree" with facts to make edits to the sections to reduce their rating without just deleting them. It just makes me thing of those people who say "yeah, but evolution is only a theory" to undermine it, I can see them making minor changes to wordings of things to make the facts seem less debatable.
Of course, if someone was doing that, it would be impossible to say if they were doing it because they wanted to supress facts by making them look less reliable, or if there were simply trying to contribute to the quality of an article.
doesn't this sort of thing happen fairly often? Company A pays Company B X dollars to ensure that company B will not sue Company A for any sort of legal infringments? I think it happens mostly with patents.
Not saying that it's right, just that it does seem to be the status quo.
They used to sell hardware to dump various cartridges onto the PC, I can't remember what it was called now, but they were available. Of course for most cartridge based systems, documentation has been done to the point where it is possible to build a reader yourself. You can also still find blank SNES carts for sale every once in a while, although I never bothered with buying any since it's much easier to just run games under ZSNES or Snes9x. Of course, as I understand the law, it's perfectly legal to download a rom from a website if you own the game anyway.
Just thought I would point out that there are some of us who do have legal roms, and there is still a strong (but dwindling) development community making SNES games. I remember reading on slashdot a while back about a guy who is making Grand Theft Auto for the NES.
I think that an undocumented but fully implemented API is better than a fully documented but completely unimplimented API, if those are really my only options. However, if I am looking do so something and I find a well documented, complete (or nearly so) API that does what I want to do, I am very inclined to use it. On the other hand, if I am presented with an undocumented API, I am much more likely to look at other options, roll my own, etc. There might even be cases where a fully documented and unimplemented API might be better, giving me the chance to implement the code with all of the design and documentation needed already there.
Here is the way I've always looked at UI, and why I've always viewed it as important. The first thing of note is that the User Interface is the way that the consumers access the functionality of the product. If the user is unable to access the functionality, then for all intents and purposes it's not there. Trying to sell (or give away) an application with a poor UI is akin to trying to promote an undocumented library or API. There will be a few hard core people who will invest the time, but the majority of people, if they are unable to see the funcationality they want up front, will simply move on to something else.
Looking at a UI from this perspective, it's obviously important because if a client can't access the functionality they need from your product, then they will simply think that your product is lacking this functionality (I would argue that it IS lacking it, since being able to access some function is part of that function working). Of course, this only goes so far. Following the above argument one could simply put a button for every possible function and let the user sort it out. This is where you get into the second big thing that a UI is good for. Marketing.
I've heard it said that, for any company, half of the advertising budget is wasted- the problem is nobody knows which half. For software, having a good UI is great for marketing. If anyone doubts this, promply smack them upside the face with a print out of all the people switching to OS X, or the feature list for Vista. This is where the eye-candy comes in.
Finally, for an application to really be successful, you want it to become industry standard. To make it to the point where your application is considered industry standard (or just a really good alternative) - or if you are in the business of designing software to order, then for your company to become a common name for C*Os as a development company, then you need to consider efficency of the UI.
What it comes down to is first you have to have a UI that isn't completely braindead, so that people can access the functionality of your application. Next you need to make it pretty so that people will try it, and finally you need to make it an efficent application so that people will continue to use it and buy updates.
A lot of applications are really good at one or two of these, but the ones who master all three really become big players in the software industry. It really applies to all areas of software, and product design in general. You wouldn't ship an MP3 player that required you to open up the machine and analyze the circuts to figgure out if it can play Ogg Vorbis. You don't see any new cars that are shipped from the factory with the weld seams not filed down and the body unpainted, and you don't see many cell phones where you have to go through 12 menues to be able to dial a phone number. Why would you ship software that had analagous flaws?
In the end, I think a lot of people underestimate exactly how much a UI matters, and I think that a sane argument can bring it to the attention of a lot of people. However, if you find that your arguments are going nowhere, then it might be time to start looking for a company where your talents will be valued and put to use.
I fall into this category as well. I started running Linux in the late 90's (sometime around 97 I think, maybe 98), and in 2002 when I started college and was in the market for a laptop, I ended up getting an iBook. There are a lot of things that I like about OS X, but I have to say that once the "gee wiz" factor wore off, I find myself really prefering to use Linux. Part of it is the familiarity with Linux, but there are a lot of things that are just harder to do in OS X, and things that just work better under KDE for instance. I think KDE was always ahead of OS X as far as raw usability, but OS X used to have the edge in eye candy. Now with XGL/Compiz, and Linux applications adopting (and often improving on) the things that OS X did right, OS X has, it seems to me, moved from feeling like a very polished commercial Unix to a "almost as good as the real thing" *nix.
For me, the only thing that keeps me having OS X around at all is the fact that there is no Photoshop for Linux. I think that's the big thing for OS X right now is it has commercial software, but it's not Windows.
If you run Windows or OS X. Don't forget that even though it's easy, it's also illegal in the US to watch DVDs under Linux because it violates the DMCA.
fair enough. Sims are definiately not casual games, and I would probably put visual novels under the RPG category. There are also edutainment games, which may or may not be casual, and rail/lightgun shooters (which, sadly, you don't see much anymore, I hope to see a resurgance of those types of games on the Wii) The reason I put misc. on there is because there are a lot of casual sorts of games that don't really fit into any genre, or transcend a lot of genres.
It's impossible to come up with a single definitive set of categories, because there are different ways to divide up games.
To try to answer your question though, here is how I generally break down games. It is by no means efficient nor without redudency, but it is how I mentally categorize games.
Japanese and Eastern Style Console RPGs
That focus on exploration
that focus on story
that focus on skills/collecting
Western Style RPGs
MMOs
Try try to emulate D&D
Fighting Games
old school/buttonmashers
Strategic
Combo Based
Platform Games
Where you use guns
Where you jump on enemiesheads
Where you push blocks around
Sports Games
That are like Madden, *2K\d, etc.
Tony Hawk, etc.
Strategy Games
That rely on quick micromanagement
That rely on a lot of planning
First Person Shooters
that focus on teams
That focus on twitch movements
Brawlers/Beat-em-up
that are RPG-ish
ThatarePlatformer-ish
Casual Games
Card Games
Word Games
Board Games
Match/Line Up groups of things(tetris,bejeweled, etc.)
Reflext/Twich games
Misc.
Anway, that is a much bigger list than most gaming publications use, but the top categories are largely the same. I think that this sort of system works because it basically tells you what the core sort of game play is. In your example, you lumped action adventure, adventure, FPS, etc. together, but I don't think that's fair at all. For example, I love action adventure games (i.e. zelda, metroid, etc.) but I hate first person shooters. The two styles of games play differently. I find the categories useful because I have been playing games for a long time, and I know what sorts of games I do and do not enjoy. I know that if a game sounds interesting, but I find out it's a FPS, then I can completely disregard reading anything else about it. Likewise, if a game is a western style RPG, I know that I should scrutinize it a bit more before making a decision, because while I haven't disliked every western style RPG that I've played, in general I don't find them as fun to play (I would rather have a very well done and highly linnear game, ala Final Fantasy, than a poorly done limited sandbox game that pretends like you can do anything. If I'm going to play D&D I'll play the real thing thank you very much.)
I hadn't nessesarily thought about that, but that's a really good idea. I know that I would also pay extra to be able to download a movie so I could watch it while the movie is en route.
Of course, the rational side of my brain tells me that what will happen is I'll think "oh, I'd like to watch $movie" so I go to amazon, buy the movie, watch the downloaded movie, then a couple of days later when the dvd arrives I'm like "oh...well now I've watched it" and it'll get stuck on my self unopened.
I like Linux as much as the next slashdotter, and I use it as my primary OS, but saying that Dreamweaver and Photoshop run fine under Wine is a bit misleading. To be best of my knowledge, Dreamweaver MX is the latest version that runs well under wine. I know that under Crossover Office Photoshop 7 is the latest version. There are also a lot of problems that professional users will have with the way Photoshop runs under Crossover (Phtoshop crashes randomly when using certain fonts, doesn't work with Wacom tablets, color profiles, etc. don't work properly). That's not to say that Crossover isn't a nice bit of software, I have the latest version and am beta testing the new beta (I also interviewed the CEO/Founder of codeweavers, and a couple of the other developers, all exceptionally nice people) - but you're only going to make people think worse of Linux if you say "oh, such and such works" and then it doesn't.
The Gimp is also not up to par for professional (or even advanced hobbyist) level work in a lot of cases either. It really irks me because there are acutally a few things about GIMP that I like better than in Photoshop, but the total package is missing a number of key features, not to mention that it's still competing feature wise with Photoshop 6 or 7 while CS2 has been out on PC and Mac for quite a while now.
If you are doing primarily web work, VMWare is probably a good solution if you need to run Photoshop and Dreamwaver. VMWare recognizes USB devices so you can use a wacom tablet, plus it will run the latest versions of the software. If you are a graphics designer, VMWare is probably too slow to run photoshop on well, although the situation might be a bit better if you have 2 or 3 gigs of ram and a really fast processor.
My solution personally has always been to run Linux on the desktop, and have a mac laptop for Photoshop. I do wish that Photoshop was available for Linux though. Even with a photoshop license on my mac, I would happily buy a license for a Linux version of Photoshop.
<rant> Actually it's always seemed kinda dumb to me that Adobe doesn't release Photoshop for Linux. There are a lot of high end proprietary multimedia applications available for Linux (Maya, Houdini, Main Actor all come to mind) and these are all applications where an artist will often need to occasionally use Photoshop for something. It seems like if the market is there for artists buying software that can run $10,000 or more, there must be room for photoshop at a measily $400. I know that when I'm doing 3D work, it's a huge pain to want to make a minor edit to a texture, so I have to go over to my mac, edit the texture, transfer it over the network, then reload it in Maya, then I might have to render the image to layers, transfer that image back over the network again, then open it up in photoshop to edit. It's not the end of the world, but it's significantly disruptive to my workflow that I would glady pay for a Photoshop license for Linux.</rant>
I use KDE as my window manager almost exclusively (sometimes I use WindowMaker when I feel like something a bit more light weight). Since Konqueror is so tightly integrated with KDE, I really have tried to like it as a web browser, but there are a few things that keep me comming back to firefox. The first thing is the extensions. There are a lot of extensions that are neat, but there are some that have become absolutely nessesary for me, such as aspellfox, flashblock, adblock, and the web developer extension.
The second reason is that Konqueror feels like a file browser, even when you're on the web. It's a great file browser, but for me the look and feel just doesn't translate well for web browsing.
The last reason is that the rendering engine does funny things sometimes. Although not nessesarily bad, having used firefox for so long, things just feel different. Konqueror (and Safari) seems to choke on pages more often than Firefox.
I still think konqueror is a great file browser, for me though it just doesn't cut it as a web browser.
Re:Walk into the room
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, some people laugh at that, but I have the same thing happen. I remember a couple of years ago, I convinced a friend of mine to try switching from Mandrake to Suse on his laptop. Chatting with him on the phone, he complained that booting up the system was taking 15+ minutes. I drove over there to see if I could possibly diagnose the problem (he had been using linux for a while, but was never really much for sysadmining). I walk over, he boots up the machine, it boots up very quickly and runs flawlessly. Tried a couple of more times, same quick bootup. After I went home, he tried rebooting and ran into the same problem. We were both dumbfounded for quite a while, until I finally worked out that it was because when he had been using it, he was sitting in his living room, and it had hung waiting for eth0 to time out, but when I came over to look at it he put it in the docking station and plugged in the ethernet cable.
I've seen other situations like this. Many times, it's because the user is doing something they know is stupid/they shouldn't be doing, and with a techie looking over their shoulder they don't do it.
In general, with my main desktop machine and main laptop, if something funky is happening I will simply replace the part or parts in question to ensure a smoothly working machine, but I've had some interesting things with some old hardware I kept around for no real reason.
I used to have an old pentium (133 I think) that ran well, except that the CD drive would only actually recognize a disk if you tilted the computer at about a 20 to 30 degree angle when the disk was inserted. I never did figure out why this fixed it, luckily I didn't need to use the cd drive very often.
I also used to have a cable modem that would drop the connection if you so much as blew on the power cord. I always just figgured that was just some flaky hardware, and eventually got the cable company to replace it. Another really aggrevating hardware problem that I never figgured out was an old Sony DVD drive that I had. When you opened the tray, it would about 1 to 2 seconds later automatically close the tray, but when you opened it again it would stay open for about 10 seconds, just long enough to remove or insert a disk.
I think everyone runs into a situation where there is some voodoo involved in solving a problem, it becomes problematic when people stop carying about having any answers, and just care about getting something working.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the concept of offering a reward for someone who can redesign the beige box is a good one, but it seems like Intel is going after the wrong audience. It seems to me that if a company had an idea to make an amazing new design then they would already be doing it. I think a better idea would be to offer up a reward for individuals who have ideas, but not the means to actually start producing these things. Either buy the design and pay a reward, or else give the person seed money to start a business producing the things. I can think of a number of things off the top of my head that would improve the current design of the beige box, but I have no way of building one for the contest, nor do I suspect that what Intel is offering would be sufficient to get started in the business of manufacturing them.
no number of failures proves something is impossible, but it only takes a single success to prove that it is possible.
If the surgery had failed, it wouldn't have proven that it couldn't be done, but since the surgery worked, it proved that in at least some circumstances, it can be done (it can be done because it HAS been done).
In case anyone doesn't catch the reference, it's a mirrored version of a code from metroid on NES
Justin Bailey ------ ------ which allows you to start on Norfair with everything except the ice beam and without samus's power suit.
I'm not sure I agree with this. During my whole time at school, I never turned in any work that I didn't do myself. Pretty much if I didn't do something for whatever reason, I didn't feel that it was right for me to turn in someone elses work. There were times however that I turned in work that I had done previously. For the most part, I considered it not only morally justifiable, but that it would have been stupid and a waste of time to have not done so.
Most of the time these were programming assignments. If I have previously developed a class/method/algorithm to do something, you are going to have a very difficult time convincing me that there is some reason that I shouldn't use it to complete an assignment. There had also been cases where I had an assignment complete or nearly so, rather than simply using a module.
The way I see it is this: it is not academically dishonest for me to turn in some work that I had previously completed. The assumption is that I did the work, and if I did indeed do it, then I should be able to make use of that work however I want. Furthermore, the whole point of an assignment is to help the student learn how to do something, and for the professor to be able to gage how well the student has learned the subject. If I were able to, at some point in the past, complete something meeting the requirements for the assignment, then I have demonstrated my knowledge of the subject and obviously proven to myself that I can already do whatever it is that I am supposed to be learning.
well, there was an article posted on slashdot a couple of years ago about ripping vinyl with a scanner. I'm sure a team of determined hackers could refine the technology so that it would be easily usable.
Of course then they would outlaw cameras and scanners as "circumvention devices".
Agreed. Although I'm working as a developer now, my last position was doing modeling and animation. There is a lot of artistic talent involved, but I would also consider it a technical position. Working on complex scenes in Maya, I know that I spent almost as much time writing MEL as rigging, and even when your not writing code it's still no walk in the park.
You hear a lot about the relationship between music and programming. You don't hear as much about the relationship between visual people and programming, but probably because all of the really talented people in those areas are out writing software. There is an asthetic to code as well, and I think most skilled developers are aware of it, at a conscious or unconcsious level.
You are way off. What net neutrality prevents is a situation like this:
The only ISP I can get in my area is Road Runner. They want me to use AOL Search, so what they do is throttle all of the other search engines, so that I get so disguested I end up just using AOL Search.
Another example would be:
My ISP sees that a lot of traffic is going to MySpace. MySpace is making a lot of money on ads. They approach MySpace and basically say "our customers are going to your website. Pay us $x,000 a month or we will throttle access to your site so that it is unusable."
In those cases, it sucks for people stuck on those ISPs, but it can get even worse. Imagine ISP A is a large ISP in the midwest. Most traffic traveling through the US passes through them at some point. They suddenly say to everyone "we're going to queue traffic so that who ever pays us the most gets through first, and if you don't pay us at all we're going to hold all your packets for 10 minutes.".
Esentially, net neutrality prevents this sort of extortion. It doesn't mean that an ISP has to make sure everything runs at the same speed, but they can't slow things down unless they are payed a "protection fee"
or for some of us...
...
100. Sports.
1. HD games
2. HD Movies
3. Widescreen movies without the letterbox
4. Plain ol' Movies
5. TV
6. Doorstop
7. source of random spare parts
8. Coffee Table
I don't think using a jpeg for a wallpaper as opposed to a bitmap is going to save any ram. a bitmap is uncompressed, a jpeg is compressed. If you set a jpeg as a wallpaper, it still has to uncompress that jpeg to display it. Worst case is you are now using the same amount of ram, but for the jpeg you are also adding the processor cycles to decompress it.
From what I understand, a few weeks ago amazon did go down for a little bit, and apparently it was a big deal to a lot of people (I know it was on fark, and I think some other more 'mainstream' places picked it up too).
That aside, I'm not sure how much I agree with the rest of your point in general. I think a lot of the time people are more apt to trust a black box, because they can't see the possible failure points. This is a problem with a lot of things, especially computers- since if you're not an IT type person (professionally, as a student, or as a hobbyist) it's unlikely that you will be familiar enough with the systems to know their failure points, which is why we run into problems because people often implicitly trust the computer.
I'm not nessessarily talking about paying to license a patent specifically. A lot of times it comes to to a company wanting to create a product, and they end up paying off other companies in case they accidentally violate some vauge clause in some old and unused patent. I don't know about you, but if I come up with an idea out of thin air and try to market it, I don't think it's stealing just because you had the idea first (especially if you've never even made a product based on the idea).
There are two big problems I see with this:
The first is that there are a lot of articles and sections of articles in wikipedia that are heavily edited without the facts changing much. This is mostly a good thing, cleaning up grammar, etc. But the if that is used as a basis for how reliable the information is, it could be misleading because the software won't know if the facts have changed, or just their wording
The other problem that I see with this is that it makes it easy for people who "disagree" with facts to make edits to the sections to reduce their rating without just deleting them. It just makes me thing of those people who say "yeah, but evolution is only a theory" to undermine it, I can see them making minor changes to wordings of things to make the facts seem less debatable.
Of course, if someone was doing that, it would be impossible to say if they were doing it because they wanted to supress facts by making them look less reliable, or if there were simply trying to contribute to the quality of an article.
doesn't this sort of thing happen fairly often? Company A pays Company B X dollars to ensure that company B will not sue Company A for any sort of legal infringments? I think it happens mostly with patents.
Not saying that it's right, just that it does seem to be the status quo.
They used to sell hardware to dump various cartridges onto the PC, I can't remember what it was called now, but they were available. Of course for most cartridge based systems, documentation has been done to the point where it is possible to build a reader yourself. You can also still find blank SNES carts for sale every once in a while, although I never bothered with buying any since it's much easier to just run games under ZSNES or Snes9x. Of course, as I understand the law, it's perfectly legal to download a rom from a website if you own the game anyway.
Just thought I would point out that there are some of us who do have legal roms, and there is still a strong (but dwindling) development community making SNES games. I remember reading on slashdot a while back about a guy who is making Grand Theft Auto for the NES.
I think that an undocumented but fully implemented API is better than a fully documented but completely unimplimented API, if those are really my only options. However, if I am looking do so something and I find a well documented, complete (or nearly so) API that does what I want to do, I am very inclined to use it. On the other hand, if I am presented with an undocumented API, I am much more likely to look at other options, roll my own, etc. There might even be cases where a fully documented and unimplemented API might be better, giving me the chance to implement the code with all of the design and documentation needed already there.
Here is the way I've always looked at UI, and why I've always viewed it as important. The first thing of note is that the User Interface is the way that the consumers access the functionality of the product. If the user is unable to access the functionality, then for all intents and purposes it's not there. Trying to sell (or give away) an application with a poor UI is akin to trying to promote an undocumented library or API. There will be a few hard core people who will invest the time, but the majority of people, if they are unable to see the funcationality they want up front, will simply move on to something else.
Looking at a UI from this perspective, it's obviously important because if a client can't access the functionality they need from your product, then they will simply think that your product is lacking this functionality (I would argue that it IS lacking it, since being able to access some function is part of that function working). Of course, this only goes so far. Following the above argument one could simply put a button for every possible function and let the user sort it out. This is where you get into the second big thing that a UI is good for. Marketing.
I've heard it said that, for any company, half of the advertising budget is wasted- the problem is nobody knows which half. For software, having a good UI is great for marketing. If anyone doubts this, promply smack them upside the face with a print out of all the people switching to OS X, or the feature list for Vista. This is where the eye-candy comes in.
Finally, for an application to really be successful, you want it to become industry standard. To make it to the point where your application is considered industry standard (or just a really good alternative) - or if you are in the business of designing software to order, then for your company to become a common name for C*Os as a development company, then you need to consider efficency of the UI.
What it comes down to is first you have to have a UI that isn't completely braindead, so that people can access the functionality of your application. Next you need to make it pretty so that people will try it, and finally you need to make it an efficent application so that people will continue to use it and buy updates.
A lot of applications are really good at one or two of these, but the ones who master all three really become big players in the software industry. It really applies to all areas of software, and product design in general. You wouldn't ship an MP3 player that required you to open up the machine and analyze the circuts to figgure out if it can play Ogg Vorbis. You don't see any new cars that are shipped from the factory with the weld seams not filed down and the body unpainted, and you don't see many cell phones where you have to go through 12 menues to be able to dial a phone number. Why would you ship software that had analagous flaws?
In the end, I think a lot of people underestimate exactly how much a UI matters, and I think that a sane argument can bring it to the attention of a lot of people. However, if you find that your arguments are going nowhere, then it might be time to start looking for a company where your talents will be valued and put to use.
I fall into this category as well. I started running Linux in the late 90's (sometime around 97 I think, maybe 98), and in 2002 when I started college and was in the market for a laptop, I ended up getting an iBook. There are a lot of things that I like about OS X, but I have to say that once the "gee wiz" factor wore off, I find myself really prefering to use Linux. Part of it is the familiarity with Linux, but there are a lot of things that are just harder to do in OS X, and things that just work better under KDE for instance. I think KDE was always ahead of OS X as far as raw usability, but OS X used to have the edge in eye candy. Now with XGL/Compiz, and Linux applications adopting (and often improving on) the things that OS X did right, OS X has, it seems to me, moved from feeling like a very polished commercial Unix to a "almost as good as the real thing" *nix.
For me, the only thing that keeps me having OS X around at all is the fact that there is no Photoshop for Linux. I think that's the big thing for OS X right now is it has commercial software, but it's not Windows.
If you run Windows or OS X. Don't forget that even though it's easy, it's also illegal in the US to watch DVDs under Linux because it violates the DMCA.
fair enough. Sims are definiately not casual games, and I would probably put visual novels under the RPG category. There are also edutainment games, which may or may not be casual, and rail/lightgun shooters (which, sadly, you don't see much anymore, I hope to see a resurgance of those types of games on the Wii) The reason I put misc. on there is because there are a lot of casual sorts of games that don't really fit into any genre, or transcend a lot of genres.
To try to answer your question though, here is how I generally break down games. It is by no means efficient nor without redudency, but it is how I mentally categorize games.
Anway, that is a much bigger list than most gaming publications use, but the top categories are largely the same. I think that this sort of system works because it basically tells you what the core sort of game play is. In your example, you lumped action adventure, adventure, FPS, etc. together, but I don't think that's fair at all. For example, I love action adventure games (i.e. zelda, metroid, etc.) but I hate first person shooters. The two styles of games play differently. I find the categories useful because I have been playing games for a long time, and I know what sorts of games I do and do not enjoy. I know that if a game sounds interesting, but I find out it's a FPS, then I can completely disregard reading anything else about it. Likewise, if a game is a western style RPG, I know that I should scrutinize it a bit more before making a decision, because while I haven't disliked every western style RPG that I've played, in general I don't find them as fun to play (I would rather have a very well done and highly linnear game, ala Final Fantasy, than a poorly done limited sandbox game that pretends like you can do anything. If I'm going to play D&D I'll play the real thing thank you very much.)
I hadn't nessesarily thought about that, but that's a really good idea. I know that I would also pay extra to be able to download a movie so I could watch it while the movie is en route.
Of course, the rational side of my brain tells me that what will happen is I'll think "oh, I'd like to watch $movie" so I go to amazon, buy the movie, watch the downloaded movie, then a couple of days later when the dvd arrives I'm like "oh...well now I've watched it" and it'll get stuck on my self unopened.
I like Linux as much as the next slashdotter, and I use it as my primary OS, but saying that Dreamweaver and Photoshop run fine under Wine is a bit misleading. To be best of my knowledge, Dreamweaver MX is the latest version that runs well under wine. I know that under Crossover Office Photoshop 7 is the latest version. There are also a lot of problems that professional users will have with the way Photoshop runs under Crossover (Phtoshop crashes randomly when using certain fonts, doesn't work with Wacom tablets, color profiles, etc. don't work properly). That's not to say that Crossover isn't a nice bit of software, I have the latest version and am beta testing the new beta (I also interviewed the CEO/Founder of codeweavers, and a couple of the other developers, all exceptionally nice people) - but you're only going to make people think worse of Linux if you say "oh, such and such works" and then it doesn't.
The Gimp is also not up to par for professional (or even advanced hobbyist) level work in a lot of cases either. It really irks me because there are acutally a few things about GIMP that I like better than in Photoshop, but the total package is missing a number of key features, not to mention that it's still competing feature wise with Photoshop 6 or 7 while CS2 has been out on PC and Mac for quite a while now.
If you are doing primarily web work, VMWare is probably a good solution if you need to run Photoshop and Dreamwaver. VMWare recognizes USB devices so you can use a wacom tablet, plus it will run the latest versions of the software. If you are a graphics designer, VMWare is probably too slow to run photoshop on well, although the situation might be a bit better if you have 2 or 3 gigs of ram and a really fast processor.
My solution personally has always been to run Linux on the desktop, and have a mac laptop for Photoshop. I do wish that Photoshop was available for Linux though. Even with a photoshop license on my mac, I would happily buy a license for a Linux version of Photoshop.
<rant> Actually it's always seemed kinda dumb to me that Adobe doesn't release Photoshop for Linux. There are a lot of high end proprietary multimedia applications available for Linux (Maya, Houdini, Main Actor all come to mind) and these are all applications where an artist will often need to occasionally use Photoshop for something. It seems like if the market is there for artists buying software that can run $10,000 or more, there must be room for photoshop at a measily $400. I know that when I'm doing 3D work, it's a huge pain to want to make a minor edit to a texture, so I have to go over to my mac, edit the texture, transfer it over the network, then reload it in Maya, then I might have to render the image to layers, transfer that image back over the network again, then open it up in photoshop to edit. It's not the end of the world, but it's significantly disruptive to my workflow that I would glady pay for a Photoshop license for Linux.</rant>
I use KDE as my window manager almost exclusively (sometimes I use WindowMaker when I feel like something a bit more light weight). Since Konqueror is so tightly integrated with KDE, I really have tried to like it as a web browser, but there are a few things that keep me comming back to firefox. The first thing is the extensions. There are a lot of extensions that are neat, but there are some that have become absolutely nessesary for me, such as aspellfox, flashblock, adblock, and the web developer extension.
The second reason is that Konqueror feels like a file browser, even when you're on the web. It's a great file browser, but for me the look and feel just doesn't translate well for web browsing.
The last reason is that the rendering engine does funny things sometimes. Although not nessesarily bad, having used firefox for so long, things just feel different. Konqueror (and Safari) seems to choke on pages more often than Firefox.
I still think konqueror is a great file browser, for me though it just doesn't cut it as a web browser.
Actually, some people laugh at that, but I have the same thing happen. I remember a couple of years ago, I convinced a friend of mine to try switching from Mandrake to Suse on his laptop. Chatting with him on the phone, he complained that booting up the system was taking 15+ minutes. I drove over there to see if I could possibly diagnose the problem (he had been using linux for a while, but was never really much for sysadmining). I walk over, he boots up the machine, it boots up very quickly and runs flawlessly. Tried a couple of more times, same quick bootup. After I went home, he tried rebooting and ran into the same problem. We were both dumbfounded for quite a while, until I finally worked out that it was because when he had been using it, he was sitting in his living room, and it had hung waiting for eth0 to time out, but when I came over to look at it he put it in the docking station and plugged in the ethernet cable.
I've seen other situations like this. Many times, it's because the user is doing something they know is stupid/they shouldn't be doing, and with a techie looking over their shoulder they don't do it.
In general, with my main desktop machine and main laptop, if something funky is happening I will simply replace the part or parts in question to ensure a smoothly working machine, but I've had some interesting things with some old hardware I kept around for no real reason.
I used to have an old pentium (133 I think) that ran well, except that the CD drive would only actually recognize a disk if you tilted the computer at about a 20 to 30 degree angle when the disk was inserted. I never did figure out why this fixed it, luckily I didn't need to use the cd drive very often.
I also used to have a cable modem that would drop the connection if you so much as blew on the power cord. I always just figgured that was just some flaky hardware, and eventually got the cable company to replace it. Another really aggrevating hardware problem that I never figgured out was an old Sony DVD drive that I had. When you opened the tray, it would about 1 to 2 seconds later automatically close the tray, but when you opened it again it would stay open for about 10 seconds, just long enough to remove or insert a disk.
I think everyone runs into a situation where there is some voodoo involved in solving a problem, it becomes problematic when people stop carying about having any answers, and just care about getting something working.